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Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America
Runner Up for the 2022 Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award
A First Things Summer Reading List Selection, 2021
How early American Catholics justified secularism and overcame suspicions of disloyalty, transforming ideas of religious liberty in the process.
In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their church's own traditions―rather than Enlightenment liberalism―to secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life.
Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the pope's authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church-state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.
The critical role of Catholics in establishing American church-state separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. Church-state separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.
A First Things Summer Reading List Selection, 2021
How early American Catholics justified secularism and overcame suspicions of disloyalty, transforming ideas of religious liberty in the process.
In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their church's own traditions―rather than Enlightenment liberalism―to secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life.
Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the pope's authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church-state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.
The critical role of Catholics in establishing American church-state separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. Church-state separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.
368 pages, Hardcover
Published May 25, 2021
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About the author
Michael D. Breidenbach
2 books2 followersMichael D. Breidenbach is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Ave Maria University. He is author of Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2021) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in William and Mary Quarterly, Perspectives on Political Science, The Things that Matter: Essays Inspired by the Later Work of Jacques Maritain, and Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833. He has also written for The Atlantic, Washington Post, and First Things. He has held research positions at Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, Penn, and Villanova and received his B.A. from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. from King's College, Cambridge.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 5, 2022
Well researched and written, compelling thesis with relevant insights for fixing our cultural misunderstandings (or lack of understanding) of the important but complicated relationship between church and state today. learned a lot reading this book.
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